While it may be true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a new computer model helps reveal what’s behind peoples’ ideas of facial attractiveness.

Many studies have concluded that people are drawn to “average” faces and those who fit the conventional notion of attractiveness for a person’s gender — “masculinity” in men and “femininity” in women. But psychologists Christopher P. Said of New York University and Alexander Todorov of Princeton University believe attractiveness is more complex than that, so they created a computer model to identify and measure those complexities.

The psychologists used thousands of faces and their ratings, from 20 male and 20 female students rating opposite-gender faces, to build the computer progra